Minty fresh breath is exactly what you need to feel confident when out and about, especially on a date.

But, as Extra found out, it’s not something people think or care about when the world goes into lockdown. Extra’s long standing association with ‘confidence in dating’ for 16-24s became redundant overnight.

Gum wasn’t relevant and the whole category was tanking. Our brief was to drop dating and to entirely rethink established category usage occasions to regain salience, find relevance and generate sales.

But our deep dive discovered something really interesting. After the initial shock of lockdown - and people forgetting to even wash and clean their teeth, behaviours hadn’t shifted the way we expected.

We now realised that minty fresh booster could be as much of a confidence booster for online dating as traditional offline dating. So to cement this new brand association and to help the nation’s singletons navigate the strange new world of lockdown romance, we joined forces with Channel 4 and Lime Pictures to bring cult UK TV show Celebs Go Dating out of retirement, turning it into ‘Celebs Go Virtual Dating’.

From the initial idea to media, creative and influencer strategy, The UK led the charge with creating an entire creative system that would help young people find the skills, tips and help they needed for dating from their favourite celebs.

We would once again be helping 16-24 year olds feel confident, but this time helping them navigate love in a lockdown - also being the first brand to associate with this emerging cultural trend.

We enlisted four new celebrities, brought back stars of the show Anna, Paul and Tom, and enlisted comedian Rob Beckett to provide commentary around how well (or not) the celebrities are faring.

The celebrities would be helped through the trials and tribulations of dating in lockdown, including vetting love matches online and creating socially distanced dates.

As an ad-funded show, we were fully integrated into the content, writing and producing the idents and creating spin-off social and influencer content to infiltrate social feeds, as well as digital and VOD activity.

And we even took it on-pack and in-store, with personalised ‘find your other half’ packaging giving lucky winners the opportunity to win £10,000 towards the ultimate dating experience.

Not only did we deliver relevance and sales in spades, we gave C4 their best performing AFP, EVER.

• Sales of Find Your Other Half Extra Bottles increased by 600%.?

• Multipack sales increased by 216%

• 80% of viewers said Extra made them feel more confident.

• 23.4m impacts with 16-24s

• And brand relevance increased by 40%

The campaign was so successful in driving genuine relevance with 16-24s, we’ve already extended it, creating the first ever bespoke, cross platform spin-off of a C4 linear show.

“Thanks to our proactiveness, we had a contingency for Love Island being cancelled and a campaign that worked for the brand, keeping our customers excited”

Daniel Newell, Portfolio Director Mars Wrigleys